Star Trek: The Next Generation

Last time on Star Trek: The Next Generation…

“It’s almost facile, trivial, in fact, to read “Unification”. The fandom narrative is both obvious and trite: The unification of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, or to be more precise, their fans. Collectively the first and second parts of a three-part 25th Anniversary gala celebration that will heal once and for all the acrimonious rift in Star Trek fandom that has existed since 1986, or so the story goes. In truth, this is all merely comforting platitudes designed to hide a reality deeply uncomfortable to Trekkers; that there is no such thing as a Star Trek fan. There are only fans of specific incarnations and philosophies of the meta-work, something that the looming premier of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is only going to highlight all the more starkly.” 

“And sure, Sarek has an incredibly memorable scene with Captain Picard, but all that does is reinforce the Captain’s position in the narrative: It sets up that Jean-Luc is someone Sarek has a history with and is close enough with that he’ll have him near while his mental faculties are slipping away from him. Indeed, we even learn that Sarek and Jean-Luc had mind-melded at one point, a fact that is left, like the rest of their relationship (and so much about the new show’s backstory) to our imaginations in the negative space of the narrative ether. 

(The scene itself, I might add, really is a triumph. It’s a lot more brightly lit than I remember, though: My memories of this exchange always cast it in very stark shadow, something very much akin to “Lonely Among Us”, or even “The Empath” from the Original Series. I guess it’s the combined effect of the detail revealed by the Blu-ray restoration and the fact I no longer watch Star Trek: The Next Generation on a hulking 1980s CRT TV. I think I’ll still remember it that way though.)  

With all that said, perhaps you’ll forgive me that in a two-part story that explicitly invokes the Original Series with guest appearances from two prominent characters from that show that the most memorable part of this episode for me personally is actually the B-plot involving staking out a space junkyard.”

And now, the conclusion…

Of the two “Unification” halves, this is the one my memory tends to shortchange the most. Pretty much all of the moments from this story that are personally iconic and resonant for me hail from part 1, while this one I always seem to remember as being an extended runaround to make Spock look awesome. That turns out to not be the case at all, however: “Unification II” is one of the most sophisticated and nuanced stories Star Trek: The Next Generation has done in a very long time and certainly earns the classic status is accrues along with its predecessor.…

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It’s almost facile, trivial, in fact, to read “Unification”. The fandom narrative is both obvious and trite: The unification of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, or to be more precise, their fans. Collectively the first and second parts of a three-part 25th Anniversary gala celebration that will heal once and for all the acrimonious rift in Star Trek fandom that has existed since 1986, or so the story goes. In truth, this is all merely comforting platitudes designed to hide a reality deeply uncomfortable to Trekkers; that there is no such thing as a Star Trek fan. There are only fans of specific incarnations and philosophies of the meta-work, something that the looming premier of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is only going to highlight all the more starkly.

Those classical Star Trek fans, who knew everything about everything and everybody, are now so small a minority as to be statistically irrelevant. Perhaps things are beginning to swing back to the other pole these days in the age of Netflix and binge watching, but this was most certainly the state of affairs in 1991. I know this as well as I can know anything because I was there. I was fully present and entirely swept up in the Star Trek 25th Anniversary fervor. A deeply strange celebration for me personally, I should add, as I knew next to nothing about the thing that was actually turning 25, and, to be honest, I didn’t much care to learn. All I knew was that the show I sat in front of the TV set transfixed by late at night was now suddenly everywhere and everyone I knew was talking about it.

We’ve of course established that Star Trek: The Next Generation was never a cult show, but even by its admittedly lofty standards things had definitely been kicked into high gear. Some of this is on me, as I never really talked about this sort of thing with other people (for the simple fact that I had nobody else to talk about it with: I don’t mean the show was unpopular, I mean I had no neighbours and my only friends were the people I was related to). But even so, I do seem to recall that this was the first time I started to become aware of Star Trek: The Next Generation existing as kind of large-scale media phenomenon-As if from nothing, there were suddenly Star Trek: The Next Generation toys showing up on the shelves of the local five-and-dime, which filled me with equal parts delight and astonishment. This was also around the time I started to get entertainment industry magazines like Starlog, and Star Trek: The Next Generation was the only thing on anybody’s mind. It felt exciting and affirmational to be a part of something that so many people clearly had so much affection for.…

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Oh, hell no. Fuck this. Fuck everything about this.

It’s never a good day when Wesley Goddamn Crusher shows up. Doubly so when he stars in a horrid piece of youth-hating reactionary drivel. It’s bad enough he’s back in insufferable early first season “Wesley Saves The Day by Out-Thinking the Ship Full of Trained Scientific Professionals” mode without the show then putting him in a plot reminiscent of a Bush-era After School Special.

“The Game” is about a bunch of aliens trying to hook the Enterprise crew on an addictive video game that’s really a mind control device in disguise in order to spearhead an invasion of the Federation. And in 1991, at the height of Sonic the Hedgehog mania and the dawn of the fourth console generation, there’s really only one fucking way to read that. Even though we’ve not quite arrived at the defining video game moral panic of the 1990s set in motion by Mortal Kombat and Doom, there was still mounting concern over the industry’s rapid rise to prominence throughout the Long 1980s and “video game addiction” was certainly starting to become a popular buzzword and the hip new way for moral guardians to clutch their rosary beads and fret about the poisoning of the youth. And with this episode, Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show that had a not-insignificant level of clout with kids, is throwing its lot right in with them.

Although he makes overtures to Invasion of the Body Snatchers too, even writer Brannon Braga explicitly confirms this is what this episode is about. And of course it is. Literally, what else could it be about? And while video game addiction is an actual thing (in fact, it’s probably way more of a thing now then it was in 1991), I do not want to hear the hyperconservative Long 1990s take on this issue ever again, and *certainly* not from Brannon fucking “I now write 24 and that awful fucking reboot of Cosmos” Braga. Don’t get me wrong, the man’s terribly underrated as a creator and has his talents (and we’ll get to them in another season or so), but he doesn’t make a convincing case for himself at all in his debut outing as a staff writer. Seriously, when your story makes Codename: Sailor V look progressive by contrast, something has gone irreparably off the rails somewhere along the way.

Ashley Judd is in this episode. She is good. That’s all I have to say about that.

I suppose I’d better provide some background context to all this for those reading who didn’t live through more video game hardware cycles than they’d care to admit or spend way too much of their free time in a Sisyphean endeavour to write about the industry positively and productively. The transformation of video games as both a medium and an industry over the course of the Long 1980s is an interesting one (Well, to me it is at any rate): To start out with, and I know how hard this is to believe looking at them today, but video games actually started out as a pastime for active social adults.…

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Well, the obvious joke to make is that the title is incredibly fitting.

But aside from being facile, that would also be a bit unfair. This episode isn’t a complete hangar fire: It’s got a cool setup and a few memorably defining moments for Captain Picard. A Star Trek: The Next Generation genre romp send-up of disaster movies had a lot of potential, even if it is still the sort of thing the Dirty Pair TV show could do way more intelligently in its sleep on an off day. There’s a discussion to be had about how challenging this series is finding it to do just plain “fun” episodes every once in awhile, both due to external fan pressure to be “serious” and due to the fact that, frankly, I think this creative team is pretty poor at comedy (which is almost criminal considering the cast are comic geniuses). That’s not the discussion for today though, because that’s not the main problem. There are, however a *lot* of things conceptually wrong with “Disaster” on a number of different levels, and the combined weight of them all sadly scuttles it.

Let’s talk about the good first. Captain Picard’s scenes where he’s stuck in the turbolift with a group of little kids are genuinely heartfelt and touching. It should be said the subplot is not quite as originally conceived: Ron Moore (who didn’t write the story, but liked the idea and adapted it into a teleplay) said he had them stranded in the turbolift because he actually wanted it to be raining. Moore had been reading about the hangar where NASA built the Saturn V rockets, which were so tall that clouds would actually form in them and start raining. Moore thought that the Enterprise turbolifts were of comparable height and that, with no power, it might start to rain in there too and that lightning might arc across the metal siding. Unfortunately, doing live water special effects on set is a logistical nightmare, so that part of Moore’s treatment had to get cut.

But even though the segment isn’t as dramatic and impressive as it could have been, it’s still an unquestioned highlight. You would think, the way the episode is set up to put the crew in situations they’re uncomfortable with so we can watch them fail (more on that later) and Picard’s famously known dislike of children, that it’s going to end up a comedic runaround of forced awkwardness, and there is a little of that. But what there’s a lot *more* of is Picard slowly coming to respect, understand and actually *like* these kids. Patrick Stewart can’t help but play gentle and supportive, and it’s impossible not to smile at the sweetness of Marissa becoming the new “Number One” or Patterson becoming “executive officer in charge of radishes”. For a show that we’re trying to claim works by children’s television logic on at least some level, it’s nice to get a kind of diegetic nod to that here.…

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Time for another of our semi-regular “Everyone else hates this story but I like it” essays!

“Silicon Avatar” is an episode that, to my knowledge, does not have a terribly good reputation. To be fair, I don’t get the sense it truly is outright hated; it’s more like nobody really talks about this one all that much. Though that said, Brent Spiner doesn’t like this outing, and Michael Piller said he was disappointed with the execution. I can’t see the criticism myself: I’d hesitate to call “Silicon Avatar” a classic, but it’s an incredibly solid effort and another very good “model average”. That is, this is the kind of story Star Trek: The Next Generation should be shooting for on a week-to-week basis. It works, and it doesn’t horrifically betray the show’s core values in any way. Which is kind of refreshing: We don’t seem to get a lot of these in Star Trek.

But maybe that’s telling. “Silicon Avatar” is, obviously, Moby-Dick in Star Trek again. What’s notable about this is that it’s the only time Star Trek will ever actually *succeed* in adapting Moby-Dick apart from the first, which was, of course “The Doomsday Machine”. The reason these two episodes work while “Obsession”, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek First Contact don’t is because it makes Captain Ahab a guest character who comes to the Enterprise to work through their issues instead of saddling one of the main characters with this story. Also, they’re not infuriatingly pretentious and don’t feel the need to shove their perceived cleverness and self-absorbed middlebrow intellectualism down our throats every five minutes. And (if you can stretch your memories all the way back to the first book), just like “Silicon Avatar”, “The Doomsday Machine” was an exceptional episode that really shouldn’t have been: It was the story that should have characterized the second season of the Original Series on balance.

It also probably says something, however, that “Silicon Avatar” is seen as middling and marks an important distinction between the Original Series in its second season and Star Trek: The Next Generation in its fifth. And what it says is that this is already shaping up to be one hell of a year: Yeah, last episode was something of a misfire and so’s the next one (and the one after that, actually) but these are aberrations. From here on out all the way until 1994, Star Trek will pretty much be jumping from peak to peak.

Another mark of the maturity Star Trek: The Next Generation can and should bring to a story like this shows in the way Doctor Ahab Marr is depicted. This is a genuinely tragic character whose fall from grace here packs a true emotional punch. Jeri Taylor, who wrote the teleplay, felt that this was a very important story to tell and threw herself into the writing process so much she found it mentally distressing.…

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Three words, heard only in hushed whispers. Deep Space Nine.

It would of course be unfair to say that Ro Laren and her namesake episode only exist to set up the forthcoming fourth Star Trek series. Star Trek can and will get that cynical, and it is true that Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was well into pre-production by this point. It had a name and a setting-a space station adrift near the formerly occupied planet of Bajor, a planet whose people and history are introduced here. It would probably be more accurate, however, to say that Bajor and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were ideas developed concurrently. And while certainly the possibility was always there that Ro might get spun off as the lead of the new show, “Ensign Ro” itself is no backdoor pilot: This story, and its titular character, absolutely belong to Star Trek: The Next Generation, and with Michelle Forbes now officially onboard, the Enterprise family is finally complete (or, at least as complete as it’s going to get on television at any rate).

Before we move on though, it may be worth it to take a little time to talk about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as it’s the more or less open secret that will be swirling around the Paramount lot for the next year or so. In 1991, then studio executive Brandon Tartikoff, whom savvy readers will remember as the former NBC exec who is credited with pitching the concept of Miami Vice (it wasn’t him, but rather Anthony Yerkovich, though Tartikoff was involved in the initial production) approached Rick Berman and Michael Piller with the idea of doing a new Star Trek. The impetus was, simply put, that Star Trek: The Next Generation was a $25 million-a-year cash cow that couldn’t run forever. Paramount hoped to effectively double their profit margins by having two Star Trek shows airing simultaneously, and the idea was that this new show would run alongside The Next Generation for several years (the exact number is never given in official histories, but it seems reasonable to assume it would have been another five seasons) and, when its older sibling finally went off the air, the Star Trek mantle would then fall to it.

As calculated as the move may have been, this did not dissuade Berman and Piller from pouring their heart and soul into the project. They strove very hard to come up with a show that would both thematically compliment Star Trek: The Next Generation and allow it to do things creatively they currently couldn’t do, or had a hard time doing (including, naturally, the Almighty Conflict, but that’s a rant for another night). Pretty much immediately the decision was made that the new show basically had to have a stationary setting, because it wouldn’t be right to have two suspiciously similar shows about voyaging starships happening at the same time. That setting would need to be a space station too, as marooning the new cast on a planet would be a bit boring.…

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Shaka, when the walls fell.

We have time again before the solar tide turns. What would you like to hear? I’ll tell you the oldest story I know. Two women, alone on a beach, around a fire.

And then it began again. Leah walked with starlight. She makes her rounds across the sky every night, just as she always has, and you can see her if you gaze into the heart of the galaxy. Captain Picard came to her and asked if he might walk as she did, and the two set off together telling each other stories. Captain Picard asked Leah “Please tell me about the stars”. But Leah spoke in the language of dreams and memory, not of tongues, and couldn’t rightly answer Captain Picard’s question to his satisfaction. But Geordi La Forge, a wise and clever man who could see beyond into The Way Things Make Themselves Appear, understood Leah and spoke words to represent the things she had dreamed. “It’s like the stories we were told long, long ago,” Geordi would say. “The stars are our ancestors, and they’ve seen all these things before. We turn to them and become them in order to live our lives, for they have lived them before us”.

Geordi could see that appearances were not deceiving and that facsimile was not trickery. He knew that wisdom lay within learning to love the beauty of the show, but these were thoughts that troubled Data, son of data. “I do not understand, Geordi. My programming indicates that there is Truth, certitude, and that there is then Illusion, unreality. I shall endeavour to Change My Own Name to compensate”. “That’s Bynar comfort, D. The truth is in the telling: It’s all how you look at it”. “But, if I observe a thing, does that not indicate that the thing does in fact tangibly exist?” “Exactly”. That was the story of how Data learned to create reality. There’s more to the story, but that’s for Another Time. You probably want to hear more about our stars.

This is the story as I know it, you have to understand. Every storyteller has their own being-becoming, and this is mine. But I don’t think you mind. A long time ago, when the world felt new again, we looked to the stars to guide our course. We were one in those times and lived waking dreams that played out into infinity in all directions. If you look up at the stars tonight, maybe you can feel yourself reconnecting with a part of you and I that exists in another timespace. Can you? Invoke not just your memory, but your memory of existing as a memory. Do you remember that we used to talk through the energy of the visions we beheld? Can we couple once more with that which we used to see, and The Way We Used To Be Seen? This are the questions Captain Picard wanted The Answer to.…

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Last time on Star Trek: The Next Generation…

“The point of convergence where it all leads back to. Perhaps not the greatest moment, but the defining one. In the end, it all comes back to redemption. We will redeem. We will be redeemed…”  

“The first image that strikes me is, as is always the case with Star Trek: The Next Generation, that of a starship. It’s the image that defines “Redemption” for me: That of the Enterprise being escorted by the Bortas, the first, and archetypal, Klingon Attack Cruiser…” 

“The Klingon Civil War is something I remember much more vividly than it actually plays out onscreen. My memory is that of a breathtaking spectacle of cunning military strategy and dramatic shootouts in the depths of space. In practice, we get a couple old Bird-of-Prey models flitting around Gowron’s Attack Cruiser interspersed with stock footage from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise‘. Today I sort of laugh at the slight bombast and pretension of the whole thing, but it’s ever so fun to watch again. It’s the Klingon characters themselves who I think really make it work: The way Robert O’Reilly, Michael Dorn and Tony Todd play their parts they totally sell the gravity of the situation, implied silliness and all. It’s the first and last time the Klingons can really work this way, before they fully devolve into irrelevant, if occasionally adorable, self-parody. 

This is also of course a Ron Moore script, Moore now firmly established as the go-to Klingon and Romulan guy. Thankfully, we get him in ‘world building mode’ instead of ‘angrily slagging off the Enterprise crew mode’ or ‘being misogynistic mode’…” 

“And as if to reassure us that the show is in fact aware of what this moment signifies and the responsibilities it now has to take on, its final scene cuts to Denise Crosby stepping out of the shadows, and then the fade out.

Tasha Yar is back.”

And now, the conclusion…

So to start off, can we just talk about the new intro credits for a bit? I’ve already mentioned they’re very possibly my favourite memory of the show, so I tend to notice when they change, even if only slightly. That microsecond stutter in the starfield where Wil Wheaton’s portion of the credits were hastily cut out following his departure in “Final Mission” that used to happen in the latter half of last year seems to have been fixed over the break, so it flows more seamlessly now. But more importantly, the logo now materializes through a video tunnel effect instead of swooping in from opposite ends of the screen. This somehow manages to accomplish what many had deemed impossible-Making the show look *even more* 80s than it already did. I love it, but not as much as I love the swooping. No explanation seems to have ever been given for the change, which only lasts for the duration of this season, before the intro sequence settles on its final form in Season 6: A hybrid using the cleaner editing of this sequence with the logo from seasons 1-4.…

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We always knew it was coming.

The point of convergence where it all leads back to. Perhaps not the greatest moment, but the defining one. In the end, it all comes back to redemption. We will redeem. We will be redeemed.

This is the cliffhanger season finale that looms the largest in my memory. Not my favourite…I think “Time’s Arrow” and “Descent” are probably better, and I have fonder and more vivid memories of them both. I was told, of course, that I was supposed to like “The Best of Both Worlds”, and “The Best of Both Worlds” is certainly very good at what it does. But this is the one that exerts the greatest gravity over the mental landscape of mine Star Trek: The Next Generation belongs to.

The first image that strikes me is, as is always the case with Star Trek: The Next Generation, that of a starship. It’s the image that defines “Redemption” for me: That of the Enterprise being escorted by the Bortas, the first, and archetypal, Klingon Attack Cruiser. To me, this is simply one of the most iconic designs of the series, occupies a primal, fundamental spot in my memories and is one of those images that defines what Star Trek means to me. The Attack Cruiser was designed by Rick Sternbach, and while it’s far from his first or last design for the series, it’s one of his signatures. It showcases a lineage from the old Klingon Battlecruisers of yore as well as taking some cues from Federation aesthetics (intentionally, according to Sternbach, to demonstrate the sharing and exchange of ideas brought about by the alliance).

But the Klingon Attack Cruiser also demonstrates a fastidiousness that’s uniquely Sternbach’s: While Andy Probert’s starship work tended to be defined by clean, organic elegance, Sternbach’s is absolutely loaded up with meticulously thought-out little details-There’s every manner of nook, cranny and panel all over the ship, each of which look like they’re there for a purpose and are doing something important. Indeed, there’s probably a technical manual somewhere that tells you precisely what they all do. It’s a dedication to go above and beyond and a pride in getting all of those details right that’s as much a hallmark of Star Trek creative and fan spaces as it is of anime communities, and it’s here that Rick Sternbach’s real heritage starts to shine through. The Klingon Attack Cruiser is actually far more reminiscent of 1980s sci-fi anime mecha designs than it is of the US Navy- and Golden Age Hard SF-inspired designs that characterized Star Trek’s earlier years, or even of Andy Probert’s unique flavour of artistry. One could very easily imagine it fitting in just as well in Macross or in Dirty Pair as it does here.…

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Oh no, not again.

I have to filet another Star Trek: The Next Generation sacred cow tonight. I hate doing this. But this one’s time is long, long overdue, ’cause “In Theory” is bad. Really bad. How bad? Well, in terms of gender, this is right down there in the same league as “Reunion”.

I’ll let writer Ronald D. Moore explain himself in his own words.

“I loved the notion of Data involved with a woman who fell in love with him because it was sort of a callback to when The Original Series was on. There were so many women who were in love with Spock. So much of Leonard Nimoy’s fan mail was from women, women who were falling in love with this remote, inaccessible character with the idea that ‘I could touch his heart-I could get to Spock like no one else.’ I was fascinated by that aspect of fandom. So I thought, well, what if we did that with Data and there was a woman who fell in love with a man who literally doesn’t have a heart, who could not give her something emotional. I wanted to see that relationship crash on the rocks. I wanted to see the moment when she realizes that he really can’t give back to her what she wants.”

The mean-spirited cynicism is self-evident. It always is with Moore. Like his compatriot Ira Steven Behr, that’s a signature of his. But the sheer, stupefying extent to which Moore is off the mark here is so galling I don’t even have the words to properly convey it, and what it reveals about how much Star Trek creators truly understand their fanbase and the history of their own damn show is absolutely frightening. Moore has essentially penned a 45-minute up-yours to the heart and soul of Star Trek and science fiction fandom and delivered one of the most inexcusably and hurtfully misogynistic sentiments this side of his precious Original Series. Jenna D’Sora is every single bro-ish stereotype of “clingy bitches” rolled into one: She’s vapid, shallow, air-headed and programatically dedicated to a man who doesn’t care about her in the face of all sense and reason. She’s even “on the rebound”. And she, and by extension this entire fucking episode, exists for no other reason than to bully and ostracize Star Trek’s original and most loyal fans.

That Moore’s conception of Star Trek fandom (I refuse to use the phrase “female fandom” because in the 1960s and 1970s women were the only fans of any consequence Star Trek fucking had) is blindingly ahistorical goes without saying. Those women who Moore would be so quick to belittle and infantilize were the young people of the 1960s that Star Trek inspired and who worked hard to make sure it had enough episodes to become syndicated, thus guaranteeing it a legacy and a life beyond its pathetic initial network run on NBC.…

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